Relentless: A Joe Ledger and Rogue Team International Novel

By Jonathan Maberry

In New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry's thrilling Relentless, Rogue Team International joins Joe Ledger in a new hunt that spans the globe and journeys deep into the terrifying landscape of the human heart.

JOE LEDGER’s world has been torn apart. The people closest to him have been savagely murdered and Ledger is on the hunt for the killers. His already fragile psyche has cracked apart, allowing a dangerous darkness to overwhelm him.

His hunt takes him deep into the world of the deadly black market weapons sales, and standing in his way are a new generation of private military contractors. These mercenaries have been enhanced with cutting-edge cybernetics and chemical enhancements, transforming them into real-world super soldiers. Stronger, faster, harder to hurt, and fitted with built-in weapons. They are beyond anything Joe has ever faced.

But he is not the Joe Ledger they expected to fight. He is defined by the Darkness now. The attempt to destroy him—to break him—has backfired. Instead his enemies have turned him into a far more fearsome weapon.

Everyone is out for blood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250619310

Jonathan Maberry

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling and five-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author, anthology editor, comic book writer, executive producer, and writing teacher. He is the creator of V Wars (Netflix) and Rot & Ruin (Alcon Entertainment). His books have been sold to more than two dozen countries. To learn more about Jonathan, visit him online at jonathanmaberry.

Book preview

PART 1

WHEN DARKNESS CALLS

Cross charred bridges all you want,

If you’re lucky, you won’t find me on the other side,

Waiting to exact the toll.

Exactly what? you may ask …

Well—don’t ask.

Just remember (don’t you dare forget)

When you see me

Placidly waiting by your roadside’s soft shoulder,

We were never friends.

Under my smile lurks a thousand convictions,

And two thousand preemptive persecutions,

And my eyes see sharp enough to pierce

Your very strongest veneer.

I will assume everything until you validate otherwise.

I will suspect and distrust your every intention until

You prove them pure … not an easy task.

And when you can’t, you will be vilified.

I will rip you to shreds—don’t FUCK with me.

I only look like a paper tiger.

—A SNAKE IS NEVER A KITTEN BY JEZZY WOLFE

CHAPTER 1

They say that no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

My enemies thought that if they hurt me badly enough, if they took away the people I love, that it would break me. That it would cripple me so thoroughly I would give up the fight, that my hands would be too numb to pick up my weapons ever again. That I’d be too ruined to come after them.

That was their plan.

They were wrong.

CHAPTER 2

TRSTENIK ISLAND

SOUTH DALMATIAN COAST OF THE ADRIATIC SEA

CROATIA

We came out of the darkest corner of the sky.

Silent and hungry. Gliding on the thermals, propelled by muffled motors that let us approach the island low enough to spook our way under the radar. Our avenue of approach was narrow, but we didn’t need much space. Havoc Team rode the night wind on TradeWinds MotorKites. Something my boss, Mr. Church, had commissioned long ago from a company that made ultralight aircraft. The frame was made from an aluminum-magnesium alloy that was lighter than a lawn chair but far stronger. Big silk bat wings filled the frame and extended beyond it, ribbed with flexible polymers. The motors were tiny two-strokes built for stealth rather than speed. Virtually silent. And they had a surprisingly hefty weight capacity, which is good because I’m a bit over two hundred pounds, and my combat dog, Ghost, is only fifty pounds lighter.

We wore Google Scout glasses—another gizmo concocted by one of Church’s many friends in the industry. He seems to have reliable friends in a lot of useful industries. These glasses were synced with our tactical computers, which were extensions of the MindReader Q1 computer system. The glasses could cycle from standard vision to ultraviolet, infrared, and adaptive night vision. Most NVGs cast the world in a thousand shades of luminescent green and black, and they’re fantastic as long as someone doesn’t turn on a light. The adaptive tech in ours used ultrafast reactive lenses to modify the light intrusion, keeping us from being blinded and also bringing in some natural colors that would otherwise be washed out.

My boss loves his toys. Got to say, I’m a bit of a fan, too. We all were.

I led our little flight of bats through the black night, following a line of swells that humped up as they climbed from deep water to shallows and then curled over into gentle waves. Those waves weren’t big, but they were continuous, with the soft hiss and sigh of tons of water hitting the sand and sliding back into the inky vastness of the Adriatic. Behind me, flying in a loose vee, was the rest of Havoc Team.

There were four of them, apart from Ghost and me. Our mission intel told us that we’d be more than enough for this gig. Trstenik Island was a tiny patch of wooded nothing off the coast of the much larger island of Korčula off the coast of mainland Croatia. Trstenik was only 3.66 acres, densely wooded, with some low hills and sandy soil. One of the islands nations try to lease or sell so that someone comes in and develops it into something that pays taxes. In this case, the buyer was Mislav Mitrović, a tech billionaire who’d made his fortune with some kind of doohickey that made a gizmo work for a business that I couldn’t give a cold shit about. Not that I’m a Luddite. Hardly. It’s just that the owner of the island was actually a front man for a group of other rich assholes who had their fingers deep into the global black market. And we’re not talking guys who sell knockoffs of Galaxy phones. No, these cats were in vending technologies that were giving small groups of very angry extremists the kinds of toys that allowed them to do considerable damage to their industrial, political, and religious competitors.

Through six or seven removes, Mitrović and his little crew of mad scientists were selling high-end guidance systems that turned the already dangerous RPGs into guided missiles capable of taking down passenger liners, military jets, and even ships at sea. Stuff like that. He also sold special depleted uranium loads for those RPGs that could punch right through the skin of any of the smaller navy vessels, including hospital ships.

Here’s the thing. Normally, if my crew—Rogue Team International, currently based on Omfori Island in Greece—caught wind of something like this, either Mr. Church or our COO, Scott Wilson, would pick up the phone and make a discreet call. Someone in the Sigurnosno-obavještajna agencija—the Security and Intelligence Agency, or SOA—and the SOA would send in a few helicopters crammed with shooters.

But this was a special case for us. The RTI computer team, led by world-class super nerd Bug, peeled back all the layers of the cover stories and shell corporations Mitrović was using to hide who he was really in bed with. The name Kuga floated to the top of that particular cesspool.

Kuga.

Yeah, we wanted him really badly. There aren’t words to describe exactly how badly.

Kuga was an international criminal empire specializing in black market sales of everything from polonium for assassinations to the sale and distribution of the most lethal bioweapons you can imagine. Kuga was also very likely the code name for the chief executive of that group, and there was a good chance the person behind it all was a former CIA superstar and self-made billionaire, Harcourt Bolton. For perspective’s sake, imagine if James Bond and Tony Stark had a love child, and that kid grew up to be Doctor Doom. That’s Harcourt Bolton. Smart, rich, ruthless as fuck, and he holds the number-two spot on my bucket list of people whose lives I want to destroy in very ugly and painful ways.

The number-one spot is held by Kuga’s right-hand man, Rafael Santoro. The most feared and effective manipulator, blackmailer, and extortionist the world has ever known. He has the subtlety and tradecraft to deconstruct the lives of key people and then turn them into weapons for the Kuga empire. Not willing converts—he’s not into changing hearts and minds through motivational speaking. No, his method is to make it very clear what will happen to the target’s loved ones. He shows photos and videos of what has happened to the families of people who defied him. He’s broken Navy SEALs, and that is something that’s supposed to be impossible, and breaks my heart that it, in fact, had happened.

Nothing is impossible, though. Santoro follows the Archimedes philosophy of:

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.

But here’s the thing … and this is why Santoro, not Kuga, was in my number-one must fucking eviscerate list: Santoro is also the man who murdered my entire family on Christmas Eve last year.

Yeah.

So there’s that.

Mitrović was in bed with Santoro and Kuga, which meant that he was not going to be very happy at all to wake up and have me bending over him.

CHAPTER 3

TRSTENIK ISLAND

CROATIA

Coming up on it, Outlaw, said a voice in my ear. It was the voice of my second-in-command, Bradley Top Sims. Combat call sign was Pappy because he was the oldest active shooter in the RTI. Oldest, not weakest or slowest. No, sir.

Going in, I said, and I tilted the MotorKite to spill wind. Ghost, dangling from a harness, wriggled against my thighs. He likes this part of it. Idiot dog likes parachutes, hang gliders, and these kites. I, as a rule, do not.

I angled down and followed just behind a wave, my boots less than a yard above the creamy white foam. The wave broke, and I touched down as it began to slide back, landing with short running steps. I made it to the high-tide line and knelt, popping the harness release to let Ghost jump down. He moved off a dozen yards and then stopped, raising his head, ears high, nose sniffing the breeze. I kept my hands on the MotorKite’s controls until I heard a soft whuff.

All clear.

I killed the motor.

Havoc Actual to Havoc Team, I said quietly, down and safe. Split two and two on my three and nine.

They came in like pelicans, gliding softly, landing on either side of me, switching off their machines. We all detached from the cradles of straps and immediately collapsed the MotorKites. They folded up like beach umbrellas, and we pulled canvas bags, thrust them inside, and buried them quickly in the soft sand farther up the beach.

On me, I said, and they clustered around, taking up stations like compass points, looking both ways along the beach, out to sea, and inland. Each one of them murmured an all clear.

Weapons check, ordered Top, and there were a few quick movements as guns were unslung, magazines secured. Hands patted the various pockets to make sure nothing had been lost in flight. We’d come armed with a lot of nasty little toys.

I tapped my coms unit to cycle onto the main channel with the TOC—the Tactical Operations Center—where Church, Wilson, Bug, Doc Holliday, and a room crammed with mission specialists were waiting.

Havoc is on the deck, I said.

Copy that, Outlaw, said Wilson. Good hunting.

Unless they had a reason to speak, the TOC would remain quiet so as not to distract us with chatter.

Jackpot, I said, using the call sign for Andrea Bianchi, our utility infielder, get some birds in the air.

"Subito," he said. Immediately. He had a big equipment bag slung across his back and slipped it off. From it, he removed a handful of what looked like dead cormorants. But these were sophisticated surveillance drones fashioned to look like Adriatic coastal birds. From any distance greater than six feet, they were totally convincing. He activated them, holding them one at a time next to a sensor on the small tactical computer strapped to his forearm. Then he handed them to Harvey Rabbit, a hulking giant of a man affectionately known as Bunny, who threw them high into the air. The birds’ wings deployed, and they flapped off into the night. As soon as the birds were in flight, they began sending telemetry to a screen on Andrea’s tac-com. "Bellissima," he murmured approvingly.

Bunny—combat call sign Donnie Darko—shifted closer to me, his rifle up, stock tucked into his brawny shoulder.

Call the play, boss, he said.

You and Jackpot go inland one klick until you find the service road by the gate, I said. Locate the watchtower and wait. And prep a couple of Lightning Bugs. As soon as I give the order to pull triggers, I want you to kill all communications from those towers.

Lightning Bugs are one of Doc Holliday’s wonderful new toys. These are small drones carrying e-bombs that consist of a metal cylinder—the armature—which is surrounded by a coil of wire called the stator winding. The armature cylinder is filled with the desired amount of explosive based on the desired area of effect. Once airborne, it flies to the designated height and location and then—bang. The explosion travels as a wave through the middle of the armature cylinder, and when it comes in contact with the stator winding, it creates a short circuit that compresses the magnetic field, generating an intense electromagnetic burst. All electronics in the blast radius are fried. That means no radios, no sat-phones, no cells. They also kill night vision, body cams, and—well, anything that runs on a chip.

We have to be very careful to make sure we’re outside of the effective range. Havoc Team carries a lot of very expensive gear, from MindReader uplinks to special targeting systems for certain kinds of guns, to the RFID telemetry chips we all have implanted so that we—or our bodies—can be located.

Hooah, he said. Bunny and Andrea melted away into the night.

I turned to Top and the fifth member of my team, a slender woman named Belle—no last name—who carried a Sako TRG 42, a superb Finnish bolt-action long-range sniper rifle chambered for .338 Lapua Magnum cartridges. I’ve worked with a lot of snipers over the years, including the legendary John Smith and the cold and precise Sam Imura, but Belle was her own breed of shooter. She had neither the years of practice nor the military experience of either of those men, but she brought a natural coldness and precision that set her apart. Belle was not a hunter or competitive shooter. She had no trophies, no stuffed heads on her walls—but if she wanted you dead and could line you up in the sights, you had better be right with Jesus. Belle’s call sign was Mother Mercy. She was personally trained by Violin, a woman who is arguably the deadliest sniper alive.

Yes, I run with the cool kids.

Mother Mercy, I said, you and Pappy go along the beach and up through the ravine we saw. Establish an elevated firing position where you can see both towers.

She said nothing and gave only a small nod. Lethal but not chatty.

Top said, Hooah, and they moved off together.

That left me there with Ghost. He came and sat down next to me, pushing at me with his muzzle. Ghost is a big white shepherd who has been through a lot of kinds of hell with me. Like me, he was badly injured when Santoro blew up my uncle’s house. Like me, Ghost healed in body but less so in spirit.

Like me, he wants some payback. He couldn’t say it in words, but he didn’t have to. There’s a kind of telepathy between pets and humans, and it’s a bit stronger between combat dogs and their soldiers.

I said, Let’s go get them.

Ghost gave me a wag of his bushy tail and flashed his teeth in the starlight.

Then we went hunting.

INTERLUDE 1

THE PLAYROOM

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

NEAR VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

SEVEN MONTHS AGO

It was called the Playroom, but there wasn’t a lot of fun or games happening there.

With only a few exceptions, Rafael Santoro disliked jokey or ironic nicknames. He felt it cheapened what they did and made sport of what they had planned. It was, after all, a mansion, a lab, a training center, and a staging area for what was to come. It didn’t need to be named at all, but Kuga liked the name and he paid the bills.

Once upon a time, Santoro had been the conscience to Hugo Vox, the King of Fear, a founding member of the Seven Kings. That had been a real name for an organization that ran miles deep in terms of subtlety, maturity, and elegance. Now he worked for the ex-CIA master spy who called himself Kuga—taking the pseudonym from the Bosnian word for plague. That much was fine; there was a certain panache to that. And although his new boss was quite capable of subtlety, he was hardly as refined as Vox had been. Capable of it, perhaps, but not inclined to it. If anything, Kuga saw himself like some kind of absurd blend of Hugh Hefner and a James Bond villain.

On his more tolerant days, Santoro wondered if maybe that was an artifice designed to keep him off guard. And to provoke Santoro. Kuga was certainly manipulative and petty enough to do that, even to his allies. It was, however, a bad habit shared by powerful narcissists. It tended toward excess, and Santoro was not much of a fan of excess when it came to running a global criminal empire. He preferred true subtlety—to vanish into the woodwork, to be unseen and unfelt until the blade slipped between the ribs. To stay many layers removed from anything actionable; to let other people take the blame.

But, no. Kuga had styled himself after Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories. He wanted to be known as the master manipulator, the Napoleon of crime, who crouched like a spider at the center of thousands of webs of criminal enterprise. And, after the events in Korea and Norway last year, he had accomplished that. There was probably no one except bushmen in Africa and unnamed tribesmen in the Amazonian rain forest who did not know the name Kuga. No one was more fiercely sought by the world’s many—many—law enforcement agencies and intelligence networks. And as a result, Santoro’s own name shared those Most Wanted lists.

These thoughts, in infinite variation and levels of gloomy speculation, ran through Santoro’s head as he sat next to Kuga on an Adirondack chair in the shade of a canopy, watching three very lovely young women swim slow laps in a massive pool. Kuga was on his third bourbon of the morning; Santoro was sipping café con miel—coffee with honey, a shot of espresso, and steamed milk. He’d made it himself, layering the ingredients and adding touches of ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom.

The two of them had been sitting there for nearly an hour, with Kuga slowly getting smashed while watching the women in the pool. One—a petite brunette—splashed and floundered, her head up above the water the way the inept do because they don’t know what they’re doing. She was a pretty woman, but the poor form made her ugly to Santoro. He disliked weakness in any of its manifestations.

The other two women were taller, fitter, and better at it. They’d gone into the water with the sleek efficiency of experts, barely making a splash and arrowing along for many yards before settling into mechanical crawls. Lifting their heads every other stroke to take quick breaths. One was a woman from Cameroon who had intensely dark skin and a shaved head, and the other was a strawberry blonde wearing a tight swim cap. All three wore Olympic-style swimsuits with racer backs. Santoro had not bothered to learn their names. He did not care to dive into the endless river of beautiful women who came and went through Kuga’s Playroom. Like so many things, Santoro’s sexual life was kept private, and he found fleshy excess quite distasteful.

As if reading his thoughts, Kuga said, "Can you at least pretend to enjoy the fucking view?"

Kuga was shirtless and wore a tight and skimpy red Speedo that was clearly chosen because it displayed his phallus to great effect. His body had long since lost the pallor of prison and was now an even golden brown. Kuga wore a white ship captain’s cap with the brim tugged down to shade his face and a pair of Dita Epiluxury Black Palladium sunglasses. A short red-and-white swizzle stick bobbed between his teeth when he spoke.

Yes, drawled Santoro without enthusiasm, quite charming.

Kuga snorted. Pretty sure none of these broads ever went to charm school.

Santoro declined to comment. Another thing he disliked were degrading epithets. Kuga apparently knew this and had recently begun using them more often.

The sky above the pool was a faultless blue, with no trace of haze or clouds. A few birds rode the thermals high above. Santoro squinted up, shielding his eyes with his hand. Were they vultures? He thought so. How odd. How lovely.

Not exactly sure why you have a stick up your ass today, buddy, said Kuga, but I can take a guess.

Oh, please enlighten me, said Santoro.

You think I’m wasting valuable time watching three fuck-bunnies play splish-splash when I should be working on the American Operation.

Santoro said nothing.

You don’t have a lot of faith in me, Rafael.

I have a great deal of faith in the operation we mapped out.

Heh, nice evasion. Kuga sipped the bourbon. It was not a particularly expensive brand, but when Kuga saw it in a store, he immediately bought two cases. Larceny Barrel Proof. Kuga thought it was the best thing he’d seen in months and smiled like a naughty kid whenever he opened a new bottle. Of course you like the American Operation, he continued. "Hugo Vox cooked it up, and you mapped it out. And in case you think I’m ungrateful, I appreciate you sharing the details on all those Seven Kings ops that were in the pipeline. This one is a fucking doozy, and talk about timely. Vox was a visionary, that’s for damn sure. He had his finger on the pulse of my ex–mother country. It’s so right on that nobody will think we had any hand in it because—hey, even the fake news has been calling this for years. It’ll make that freak Church shit a twenty-four-karat gold brick."

Santoro stared into the depths of his coffee. And yet here we sit, like a couple of foolish middle-aged tourists on a Princess cruise.

You see, said Kuga, pointing a finger at Santoro with the hand holding the whiskey glass, that’s the part about being executives that you don’t get.

Pray enlighten me about that, too.

You think we need to get our hands dirty. How do you still have that thought? You think we should be down in Texas micromanaging the whole G-55 thing? Hugo Vox never got blood on his hands—or dirt under his fingernails, for that matter. Neither did his mother—your goddess.

"Cuidado," murmured Santoro, the warning clear in his tone. But Kuga ignored it.

We have people working for us, continued Kuga. Very smart people. The best money can buy. Loyal, too, because they know that you’re around to give lessons in efficiency and to spank them if they step out of line. They are doing the heavy lifting while we are enjoying a gorgeous morning, drinking good bourbon—well, in your case, some fruity-ass coffee drink—and watching three insanely gorgeous women. The sun is shining, and all’s right with the motherfucking world.

You’re drunk.

Mmmm-hm. That was my actual intention. Happy to report that I’ve met my life goal for the day.

Santoro lapsed into a bitter silence. When Kuga was like this, there was no shot at a real conversation. It was a petty response to being scolded, and Kuga had no peer when it came to childish obstinacy or obfuscation.

The women swam and talked and laughed. Their voices were musical, but the day had soured, and so they seemed to be nothing more than noise.

After a long time, Kuga said, Besides, Rafael ol’ buddy, I called in some help.

Help? What’s that supposed to mean?

Someone with a little more oomph than that Barbie doll you’re mentoring.

Do not mistake Eve’s lack of education for a lack of intelligence. She has great potential to—

Yeah, yeah, she has great potential to become a criminal mastermind, blah blah blah. At best, she’s a useful knife at the end of your arm. But since Ledger killed her boyfriend, she’s been … Well, let’s face it, Eve’s crazier than a honey badger on crack.

Those extremes are useful to me for certain operations, said Santoro coldly.

Sure. Fine. Whatever. But my guy is on a whole different level. He’ll be able to take over the sales—and I guarantee you he’ll send that up like a rocket—freeing us up to work on the American thing.

Santoro studied Kuga’s profile, and it became slowly apparent that Kuga might not be quite as drunk as he pretended. He had that little inward smile. The one he wore when he was playing a game on everyone in the room.

Who is this person?

Oh, you’ve met him. Did some work for the Kings once upon a time.

"Who?"

Kuga sipped his whiskey and watched the splashing. He’s currently calling himself Mr. Sunday. Not his real name, and I know you’re superstitious and don’t like to hear his real name spoken out loud.

The warmth seemed to leach itself out of the day, leaving the Spaniard shivering despite the sunshine. He was unable to speak for a moment.

Kuga grinned. Let’s just say he’s the right man to piss in Mr. Church’s punch bowl. And he’s definitely the right guy to get our sales process back on its wheels.

Santoro frowned, and then his eyes went wide.

No…, he breathed.

Yup, said Kuga. He laughed and threw back the last of the bourbon. Abso-fucking-lutely.

CHAPTER 4

TRSTENIK ISLAND

CROATIA

We moved inland, following a narrow game trail. Above and around us, the trees swelled with wind as the breeze freshened from the southeast. Far away in the direction of the big island nearby, I heard a boat cutting across the darkened waves, the motor sound like an idling chain saw. An early fisherman heading out to the blue water between Croatia and Italy.

I heard soft rustling and turned, looking up to see that the trees around me were thick with birds. It was hard to pick out details, but from what I could see, they looked like crows or ravens. Scruffy, though, and ragged, as if they’d all been standing in a cold blast of winter wind, but this was early summer. They reminded me of something I’d once read in a book, or perhaps a poem. What was the line?

Night birds … the prophets of apocalypses large and small.

For some reason I will never understand, I waved to them. A few rustled their wings. One opened its beak to give a call, but if any sound came out, I didn’t hear it. And so I turned away, feeling uneasy. Maybe I should start reading limericks instead.

Ghost ranged ahead, and every time he encountered an obstacle, he stopped and waited for me to catch up. The first time was—of all things—a kid’s red tricycle that looked like it had been rusting there for thirty years. That made no sense, because until Mitrović bought the island, there had been no habitation here. No resorts or even a small family home. Ghost looked from the bike to me and endeavored to cock an eyebrow.

Beats me, furball, I said, and we moved on.

And almost immediately jolted to a stop. I quickly dropped to one knee. Up ahead, to the left of where Ghost was sniffing, I saw a figure. A man. Tall, slender, fit-looking. Standing in the woods with his back to me. He was silhouetted against the faint glow of lights from the mansion, which was over a series of low hills.

I murmured into my mic, Hostile spotted. I gave the approximate location and details but ordered my team to stop and hold positions.

Ghost, for some reason, did not seem to see the figure, although they weren’t more than a dozen yards apart. Ghost is trained for exactly this, but he kept moving.

I tapped the Scout glasses to bring up the zoom function, but the figure was too dark and at a bad angle. So I rose, silent as the shadows around me, and moved in the direction of the man. He was unmoving, apparently looking down at something I couldn’t see. Ghost has his own coms unit, and I shifted to that channel and ordered him to do a lateral search. I could see him lift his head, suddenly tensing as he stretched out with his canine senses. Then he moved to his left so that he and I were heading in roughly converging lines.

And then Ghost walked right past the man.

Not a pause, not a flicker. It almost looked like he walked through him, but that was clearly a distortion of bad light and dense foliage. I raised my rifle and followed the barrel to the spot.

A bat suddenly broke from a hole in a tree and fluttered straight at me in its panic. I shifted to avoid it, and when I looked again—the man was gone.

The spot where he was standing was empty.

I hurried up, signaling Ghost to close on me. He did, looking expectant but not troubled. I moved through the whole area, using the Scout glasses on the thermal imaging setting.

But there was nothing.

I knelt once more at the exact spot where I’d seen the man. The soil was dry but not hard, and it was loose enough to take a print. Except there were no prints anywhere.

It made no sense. I’d seen the man for sure. This wasn’t a case of me seeing a shrub or stunted tree and being confused. He had been tall, maybe middle aged, with gray hair, trousers, and a sweater with some kind of pattern on it. He had been right goddamned here.

There was a double click of squelch as Top sent a wordless inquiry.

Wait one, I told them.

Ghost stood by me, his body rippling with tension that he was no doubt picking up from me.

I searched all around the spot.

Nothing.

Then as I straightened, I saw something. Not a man, but a faintness of a line that ran like a strand of silver through the leaves maybe two feet from where I stood.

Had I not seen that man, I would have walked right through it.

The wire ran across the various natural walking paths and vanished into the leaves. I followed it to a small metal box attached to the base of a pine tree. It was a kind I’d never seen before, but that didn’t matter. It was without a doubt an antipersonnel mine.

I tapped into the team channel. Havoc Actual to Havoc Team, stop and listen. I described what I found.

A few moments later, Andrea said, Copy that, Outlaw. Same over here.

And then Top verified that he and Belle found the same thing.

What about the hostile? asked Top.

Sighting uncertain, I said. Stay alert.

I scanned for laser trip wires but found nothing. There were more advanced versions of trip wires, but despite dealing in technology, Mitrović liked it old-school. Physical trip wires were still one of the most effective methods of ambushing foot patrols like ours. I could feel my heart thudding.

Leave the wires intact and proceed with caution, I advised. Look for other traps.

Hooah, they replied.

I stepped over the wire very carefully and then watched Ghost jump clear. He had been trained to avoid trip wires. Maybe he would have found it had he gone a few more yards into the forest. Or maybe he and I would be scattered across this whole slope. These are the things soldiers base their superstitions on. A lucky break? Maybe. Something felt deeply weird about all this. Why hadn’t Ghost seen the man? And where had the guy gone?

Two questions for which I had no answers.

We moved on with infinite care. The uneasy feeling lingered, following me like a shadow.

The trail took us up to a small ridge, beyond which was the main house, with a few smaller outbuildings scattered in a large clearing. Some work had been done to landscape the property, but apart from a few shade trees and trenches dug for hedges, it was bare. Mitrović had filed construction permits to erect a modest mansion, but Bug had picked apart shipping records and determined that more materials had been imported onto the island than were needed to make a twenty-room home. There were corresponding labor records for a construction crew roughly five times larger than needed. Add that to geological surveys from satellite flyovers that showed a radical change in the offshore seabed consistent with the dumping of dirt and rocks far in excess of preconstruction estimates, and you have us all going, Hmmmm … what on earth could he be building?

I mean, it was either a secret base or a secret base. Possibly even a secret base. One of those things.

Thermal scans also pinged four different heat signatures consistent with industrial generators. So I’m thinking secret base with some kind of laboratory concocting god only knew what horror. Hey, I’m not being paranoid here—or at least not more than usual. Since going to work for Mr. Church a few years back, I’ve actually seen secret labs that would make comic book super-villains weep with envy. Real-world stuff. Not as much fun as what you see in the movies. Because, yeah, there are actually that many brilliant maniacs in the world being funded by rich assholes, rich governments, rich corporations who do not give a limping fuck for human beings. Except when they can exploit them, marginalize them, or remove them as an inconvenience. Like so many of the bastards I’ve gone after as part of the old Department of Military Sciences and now with Rogue Team International.

Like Kuga and Santoro, who blew my world apart a few months ago.

Like those monsters.

So Mitrović was probably living like a king in his mini-mansion while down in the basement unspeakable horrors were being cooked up. Brewed or cultured, assembled or uploaded. However he was doing it, I was coming for him.

Ghost and I inched up to the ridge top and surveyed the approach. The house was three stories tall and built of gray stone. Nice-looking place, with a retro Eastern European manor house vibe. Lots of windows, only two of them showing weak lights. Probably hallway lights. There was no fence around it, but when I checked the video feeds from Andrea’s bird drones, I saw foot patrols. Two men with Kalashnikovs slung walked slowly around the building, accompanied by a Doberman. They all looked bored, but that was something that could change in a heartbeat. A second pair were stationed in a guard shack built to look like a gazebo. They had another Doberman.

Havoc Actual to Havoc Team, I murmured. I’m at the east corner. Count four security and two dogs. I gave the locations of each and the direction of the foot patrol.

Got them, said Belle.

Two more each in the towers.

I switched the Scout glasses to low-light enhancement but otherwise normal vision. That made it easy to spot one of the two towers. They were really elevated platforms with camouflage canopies. They wouldn’t have dogs up there. Which gave us eight armed sentries but just the two dogs.

The challenge in situations like this is to decide where we fell on the force continuum. These guards might be bad guys, or they might be rent-a-thugs who merely worked for a bad guy. Killing them was not immediately justified. And I hate to kill a dog.

I slipped down from the ridgetop to study the video images in my tac-com. The little high-def computer screen was divided into different feeds, one from each bird, but I selected the overhead view from the bird circling the building at a hundred feet. What I was looking for was a blind spot where I could get close enough to ambush the foot patrol and attempt to take them and their dog out using a long-barreled, high-compression Snellig dart gun.

Sandman only, I told my team. Verify my order.

They did, and if I heard some reluctance in their voices, that was fine. I wasn’t feeling entirely charitable myself. Mercy and compassion had taken a lot of really bad hits lately. There was a cloud of darkness boiling inside me that took real effort to keep from filling my head with the kind of hatred that could erase all sentiment and humanity.

The order to use Sandman actually stuck in my throat.

It was, however, what I said. It was the only mercy I’d brought with me to Trstenik Island.

Not that Sandman is especially kind. It is a cocktail of chemicals built around the veterinary drug ketamine. It also has a little bit of BZ—3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate—to cause intense and immediate confusion, and DMHP—Dimethylheptylpyran, a derivative of THC—for muscle failure. And it has some benzodiazepines and chloral hydrate and some other goodies. We call it Sandman because if you get one hit from it, you go right down right now. No bulling your way through. You drop. Everyone does. And for the next couple of hours, you have intensely strange, disturbing, and—I’ve been told—weirdly erotic dreams. And by weird, I mean that one of the members of Havoc Team—the big kid from Orange County, Bunny—dreamed he was being seduced by penguins. And liked it. Says he has fond memories of that dream. Most people, though, have what can best be described as a bad trip. Monsters come out of the walls, memories warped into nightmares.

The person on our team—apart from me—who would be least happy about using the darts would be Belle. Calling her Mother Mercy was a dark joke because when it came to bad guys, she didn’t have so much as a flicker of pity or forgiveness. And it meant that she had to use her backup rifle, a Stoeger XM1 Air Rifle. It’s a pre-charged pneumatic weapon that has an integrated tank filled to 2,900 psi, which allows it to deliver special loads of Sandman darts at 1,200 feet per second before refilling. The .22 version of the XM1 loses a little velocity in trade for a harder-hitting pellet, with speeds around 1,000 fps. Hers was mounted with a superb scope, which mattered to a degree, because although the darts can penetrate ordinary clothing, they couldn’t punch through any kind of body armor. The ideal shot was to skin.

I took my Snellig in a two-handed grip, resting my elbow on the ridge.

Take them, I said and immediately fired nine very fast shots at the two men and their dog. My distance was about forty yards—tough range even for a specialized gun like the one I was using. The dog and one man went right down, but the other turned, grabbing for his gun with one hand and reaching for the Send key on his coms headset with the other. So, I hosed him. He staggered and sat down hard, then keeled over sideways.

Ghost and I were up and moving, sticking to the shadows until we reached the side of the house. There we paused as I waited for the rest of the team to check in.

Guard tower two down, said Top. Wait, guard tower one is also down.

I smiled. I wondered if Top had needed to fire a single shot. Yeah, Belle was that good.

Second patrol down, reported Bunny. Men and dog.

Mother Mercy, I said, take position in tower one. Jackpot, secure the perimeter. Pappy and Donnie Darko, on me.

INTERLUDE 2

THE PLAYROOM

UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

NEAR VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

SIX MONTHS AGO

You look like someone pissed in your coffee, ol’ buddy, said Kuga.

"You brought him in? His mouth had gone totally dry, and he gripped the arms of the chair so tightly the wood creaked. Are you insane?"

Plenty of shrinks seem to think so. Kuga laughed. But in this case? Nah. This is me making the kind of executive decision that will move our two biggest projects forward.

"This … man … has gone up against Church and Ledger three times that I know of. And three times, he’s failed."

Failed? No, not really. Think of the amount of damage he’s done. He nearly destroyed the DMS. He goddamned nearly helped Hugo destroy the oil supplies in the Middle East, which would have hit the stock market like a tsunami. I know Vox had hundreds of his people poised to profit from that, the same way he had buyers ready to grab stock when the planes hit the towers. Hell, he advised me to have my people ready when COVID hit.

Are you saying that the coronavirus was of his design?

What? Oh, hell no. That was an actual natural disaster, but our friend was very savvy about how certain world leaders would react and when to have cash ready to buy stocks during flights to safety. Mr. Sunday advised me to snap up stock in companies making hand sanitizer, bleach, surgical masks, and ventilators. I did and, fuck, Rafael, I banked a couple of billion on COVID-19. I think we made more money on that than I would have if it was something one of our labs cooked up.

"Yes, and that’s excellent in itself, but he isn’t the only person who could advise on such things."

Maybe not, but he’s the best at it. He understands human nature. He reads presidents and prime ministers very well and can go from a press briefing or Twitter post to a buying frenzy faster than anyone I’ve ever known. And not only will he handle sales for us, he said that he has some ideas for how to mindfuck your boy Ledger. That boy’s already on the edge, and Mr. Sunday says all it’ll take is the tiniest of pushes.

Santoro set his coffee cup down hard enough to splash half of it onto the table. He is a monster. He is the most dangerous person I’ve ever met. His motives are always his own. He was never really on Vox’s leash. Never. He always has a personal agenda.

"Second most dangerous, corrected Kuga. Let’s keep perspective. Church is the real Big Bad. But Mr. Sunday is the scariest cocksucker on our side. And he is on our side, Rafael. Make no mistake."

He was on Hugo Vox’s side, too, and Vox is dead, said Santoro coldly. "He was on Zephyr Bain’s side, too, and she’s dead. Same with Grigor and the Upierczy."

"Sure, but I can name a dozen other people he worked for, going way back, too, who weren’t killed during a shared operation. Point is, the deaths of some of his employers were not his doing or his fault. If anything, it was the excesses of people like Vox and the rampant insanity of Zephyr Bain that led to them being killed. Do you really want to tell me that if Hugo Vox was not at war with his own goddamned mother, he would be alive today? The Kings would still be out there making the world unsafe for widows and orphans, and you, my friend, would never have spent years in a black site prison."

Santoro glared at Kuga but then settled back in his chair, composing his features through sheer strength of will. We do not need him, insisted Santoro. We have the American Operation. We have the K-series exosuits, and we have R-33. And we have all of the formulae and technologies that are by-products of those things. We need a salesman, Kuga, not a monster. That man is too dangerous.

No, said Kuga, he’s just exactly dangerous enough.

CHAPTER 5

TRSTENIK ISLAND

CROATIA

Top and Bunny found me and earned a wag of Ghost’s tail.

They were my closest friends on the job and had been with me since Church shanghaied me into joining. Top was a Black former army ranger from Georgia who had a tight salt-and-pepper goatee and eyes that could be fatherly and kind or cold and dangerous depending on the moment. Though right now, his face was hidden by the Scouts and a balaclava.

What about the hostile you saw? asked Top.

I must have been mistaken, I said. No sign of him, no prints, and Ghost didn’t see him.

Top looked at me. I couldn’t read his expression through the glasses and the gloom. He tapped out of the team channel and pulled down his balaclava.

Not like you to jump at shadows, Outlaw, he said quietly.

Didn’t jump, Pappy, I said. Thought I saw something, checked it out, and I was wrong.

But you found the trip wire.

Yes. Right where the guy was standing.

Bunny loomed over us. He was a huge slab of white boy from Orange County. Six feet six, with more muscles than is reasonable on any human being. He was a former top amateur volleyball player turned marine Force Recon turned SpecOps cave troll. Good-natured, but only to a point. The three of us had walked through the Valley of the Shadow too many times to count, and there is no one on God’s green earth I trusted as much.

Are we talking a guard? he asked.

Wasn’t wearing a uniform, I said. No weapons that I could see. No kit or body armor.

Maybe he was a tech checking on the booby traps? Bunny suggested.

Sure, Farm Boy, said Top, because technicians routinely do that at night without lights or backup.

Hey, old man, Bunny replied, Outlaw says he saw someone. How many times has he been wrong?

I cut in. I was wrong this time.

Top kept looking at me. But you thought you saw him.

I avoided his eyes. I was wrong.

When he said nothing else, I knew that it wasn’t actually over. Top had been keeping a close eye on me since we rolled out. This was my second field op since coming back to the job. I’d lost some months recovering from injuries sustained in the Christmas Eve blast that killed my family. Top is way too sharp to assume that a healed body is the same as a healed mind or soul. He’s a wise and insightful man—qualities that make him an absolutely peerless command sergeant. And a peerless friend.

But now wasn’t the time for a heart-to-heart.

Let’s go, I said, and I headed across the lawn to the back door. Ghost was at my heels, with Top and Bunny close behind.

What do we got, boss? asked Bunny as he came to crouch beside me.

There was a standard key card reader set into the wall near the knob.

It’s all you, I told him.

Bunny reached into a pocket and produced a gizmo about the size of a nickel, removed the adhesive backing, then placed it on the underside of the key card box that was mounted to the right of the door. He then took a blank magnetic key card and swiped it slowly through the reader. On the first pass, nothing obvious happened, which was fine. That meant that the MindReader Q1 tac-com strapped to his left forearm was infiltrating the security software. When he swiped it again, even more slowly, the pass code data was imprinted on his card. A third and faster swipe unlocked the door. But here’s the fun part: MindReader is shy and prefers not to be noticed, so it rewrites the host software so that—for all intents and purposes—that door was never opened. There would be nothing recorded on any security log. Nifty.

Bunny pulled the door open as Top and I positioned ourselves for a cross fire. But we were looking into an empty mudroom. I clicked my tongue for Ghost, who stepped inside with great delicacy, as if he were walking onto a thinly iced lake. I followed, with Top behind and Bunny on our six.

The mudroom was large, with pegs for jackets and slots under bench seats for boots. Big metal bowls filled with water and dog kibble. There were photos on all the walls showing Mitrović and a variety of blond women in sailboats, on water skis, on Jet Skis, and walking on beaches. Four different women, was were what Europeans like to call American blondes—meaning long-legged, deeply tanned, with sun-streaked hair, expensive smiles, and improbably large and firm boobs. The photos could just as easily have been ads for a cosmetic surgeon, and they were just about as genuine. In every photo, Mitrović wore exactly the same kind of plastic smile.

He was a good-looking guy in his middle forties. Very fit, glowing with health, with a tropical tan over naturally olive skin, lots of curly black hair, piercing blue eyes, and a smile that went about one millimeter deep.

Not entirely sure who the photos were meant to fool. Casual visitors? Government inspectors?

Bunny produced an Anteater from his pack and turned the gain to high. It’s a device for detecting various kinds of electronics. He held it up so Top and I could see the screen. There were all kinds of electronics in the building, though the system registered no active alarms or motion sensors. Mitrović placed a lot of faith in his eight-man, two-dog security force. Dumbass.

Top leaned close and said, Don’t mean he doesn’t have something tricky on the door to the basement. There’s got to be something to let them know if we go waltzing down to Frankenstein’s lab.

Hoo-the-hell-ah, agreed Bunny.

The satellite scans of the heat signatures gave a 93 percent likelihood that there was at least one floor’s worth—and possibly two—of machinery below the one we were on. Basement and maybe a subbasement.

So we’ll be real damned careful, I said.

Unfortunately, the thermal scans couldn’t pick out human signatures with all the heat from the generators. However, shipping manifests included forty beds, eight shower and toilet sets, and enough food to feed a hundred people for six months. No way to work out exact numbers, but it sounded like a party to me.

We moved out of the mudroom into a kitchen big enough for a Manhattan restaurant, and then throughout the first floor. There were the embers of a fire in the living room hearth, but no one around. We went up a big flight of stairs in a quick, quiet single file, then took turns checking and clearing the rooms, providing cover for one another. Doing it all very quietly. The four on the left side of the stairs turned out to be two empty bedrooms, a home gym with every kind of trendy device in the catalog, and a bathroom bigger than my whole apartment. No one there.

It wasn’t until we checked the rooms on the right side of the stairs. Top and Bunny moved down the hall to take the second bedroom, leaving the first for me. I scanned the door with an Anteater but detected no alarms. So I reached for the knob.

But before my fingers closed around it, a voice behind me said, Be careful, Joe. This is a bad place for you.

I whirled, bringing up my barrel.

But the hallway behind me was empty.

Ghost whipped his head around and stared. Not at the hall, but at me. There was confusion in his dark eyes. Down the hall, I saw Top watching me. My movement had alerted him, and he looked at me and past me down the empty hall, then back to me